BackRio Olympics: That sinking feeling
The fortunes of Indian water polo teams encapsulates the decline of Indian sports
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In today’s despatch I would like to tell you two small stories from Indian sporting history. Odds are that perhaps none of you have heard of either of them. These two stories happened 66 years apart and are not, at first glance, really related to each other. But together they tell an interesting, perhaps even telling, story of the changing fortunes of Indian sports.
First we go back to September 1944. Towards the end of that month, on the 26th, the Sydney Morning Herald informed readers that Australia’s Water Polo Association had recently convened its annual meeting. The Second World War was still raging on, though denouement seemed around the corner. It was just a few months after the D-Day landing at Normandy and, closer to Australia, the Battle of Kohima, where Japanese had been repulsed from an attempted invasion of India. But in Australia they were already preparing for life after the war. At the meeting the Association had decided to resume interstate competitions as soon as possible after the war. But the main announcement was that a Water Polo team from India had promised to tour Australia once hostilities came to an end. This appears to have been a matter of great excitement. One administrator, the newspaper reported, “prophesied increased public interest in swimming", thanks to this tour by the Indians.
In November 1945, Australia’s The Age was still reporting on the forthcoming tour with great enthusiasm. Khurshed Golwalla of Bombay, it said, will conduct the tour of Indians who “play a swift and essentially clean game, foul play being almost unknown". Over the next two years or so, as the war drags to a close, more details of the tour slowly emerge. It will be mostly amateurs, we are told. Most of them from Bombay and largely funded by the Parsi community and Golwalla, a proprietor of swimming baths in Bombay. Discussions about the Indian tour of Australia appears to have dragged at least till 1949 at which point the news seems to vanish from Australian newspapers.
This could be because the Indian water polo establishment got caught up in helping the team participate in the Olympics both in 1948 and 1952, and also in the Asian Games in 1951. Exact details on scores and rankings are a bit hard to come by. But as late as the early 1970s, Indian men’s water polo was still a force to reckon with, at least at the Asian level. At the 1970 Asiad in Bangkok, India won the men’s silver, losing 4-3 to Japan in the finals. (Though there is some conflicting data on the final score. Some reports suggest it was 4-2.)
Fast forward 66 years from that original announcement in the Sydney Morning Herald. In 2010, the Indian women’s team came fourth in the Water Polo at the Asian Games in Guangzhou. Which seems commendable. Until you realize that there were only four teams in the event and the Indian women were abysmal. They conceded 96 goals in three matches and scored only six. There were clearly not in any way prepared to deal with China, Kazakhstan or Uzbekistan.
So why did they go? Because the Chinese insisted that they did. T. A. Ameerudheen reported for The Times of India in November 2010: “The China Waterpolo Association worked overtime to ensure that the Indian eves arrived in Guangzhou in time for the competition. Their travel documents were processed with due diligence even as some of the Indian journalists waited for months to get the visa approval. It spent around ₹ 6 lakh for the 15-member contingent’s air travel."
How wonderful, right? What kindness from our traditional rivals!
Not really. You see the Chinese were trying to make sure that they had the minimum four entries required for the event. Failing which, it appears, the event would not have qualified for medals. The Indian team was battered, helping China win Gold in the process, but the Swimming Federation of India was unfazed by the criticism that followed. “CSA (Chinese Swimming Association) had offered an all-expenses paid trip for our women’s team. Had we not sent our team, waterpolo’s future at the Games would have been in jeopardy," SFI secretary Virendra Nanavati told the paper. Thus all available national-level women’s waterpolo players who had a passport were sent to Guangzhou. (Except one national-camp attendee who didn’t have a passport. True story.)
Four year later, at the Incheaon Asian Games six teams turned up for the women’s event. India was not one of them. I suppose no freebies were forthcoming.
Thus in the space of around seven decades, India went from being something of a regional Water Polo mini-power to an also-ran team somewhat shamelessly manipulated to our own humiliation.
This highly summarized story of decline also points to an aspect of Indian sporting history that is often glossed over. It is not that we were terrible at sports always. Or that we were only competitive at sports that had ‘popular’ appeal. Far from it. A newly Independent India seems to have dabbled in all kinds of sports.
In 1948 we sent 79 competitors in 10 events.
In 1952 we sent 64 in 11 disciplines. India was by no means a one-trick-hockey pony. And then something happened. Quite possibly, this was the dawn of Indian sports administration. The current president of the Swimming Federation of India is one Digambar Kamat, the erstwhile chief minister of Goa.
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